There’s nothing quite like the Wexford opera festival
“Are you prepared to slay a mighty dragon, rescue a fair young maid from a harem, bake an Italian cake and take a tilt at windmills? Then you’re ready for Wexford Festival Opera 2019”.
Assume the answer is “yes”. So says Ian Fox, on an introductory CD accompanying this year’s Festival Programme. Mr. Fox is a doyen amongst critics. He wrote his first criticism for the Irish Times in 1969. A member of the “London Critics Circle”, editor of the Irish classical music magazine, Counterpoint, a governor of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (blimey, the paradoxical, republican Irish still hang on to the “Royal” moniker, dating back to 1848) and Council member of the Wexford Festival. He knows his Wexford.
In comparison, Reaction’s humble scribe (your own) is but a member of the less challenging, but much more riotously inclined, “Flaneurs’ Forum”; and a common or garden Wexford trekkie since 1977. So, bear with me as I clumsily share Ian Fox’s euphoria. It’s always a bright spot in the year when Wexford Festival Opera’s programme plonks onto the doormat. 2019 looks like being a vintage year.
There are the usual three main stage offerings, albeit played over a shorter festival calendar than in recent years – 22nd October – 3rd November. Budget constraints?
In the current political climate tilting at windmills seems a relatively sensible occupation – so, for openers, bring on Massenet’s Don Quichotte, first performance 1910 at Opéra Monte Carlo, librettist Henri Cain.
Cain was the go-to libretto guy in the Parisian Belle Époque era, writing over forty, seven for Massenet. He was something of an all-rounder – painter, choreographer and dramatist, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt.
Rodula Gaitanou directs. Already acclaimed for her stylish Vanessa, L’oracolo and Mala vita at Wexford, Massenet’s comédie-héroique gives her great scope for scenic flair.
It’s a reprise. In 1965 Don Quichotte was a Wexford knockout. After, in the 1970s, Glaswegian Thomson Smillie, Director of the Wexford Festival for five years, was a Massenet protagonist. Wexford became a Massenet cheerleader. He it was who forged close links with Scottish Opera where he started his career in the 1960s as founding director. This year’s Quichotte has some heritage to live up to.
Vivaldi’s Dorilla in Tempe is performed …… um …… not very often – premiered at the Teatro Sant’Angelo, Venice in 1726; then performed in Prague at the Sporck Theatre in 1732; and revived as a pastiche in Venice in 1734. After that – nada. Yet, it was one of Vivaldi’s favourite works and was composed for his admired mezzo, Anna Girò, who the red priest apparently accommodated in a number of respects, not all artistic.
This is a co-production with Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. For the mad keen it can be previewed at the Teatro Malibran in Venice, last performance 5th May. So, get onto your easyJet.
Aside: I had never heard of the Teatro Malibran in Venice. La Fenice, of course. The Malibran is a 17th century “true kingdom of marvels” with a bit of a chequered history. It became so dilapidated that, when in 1835 the celebrated soprano, Maria Malibran, turned up to sing Bellini’s La Sonnambula, she felt so sorry for the managers she donated her fee to a restoration job. Must have been some fee. They renamed it in her honour.
Although the work is seldom performed there are two recent recordings – 1994, Gilbert Bezzina Opéra de Nice and 2017, Naïve Records. It’s so little know that an Amazon search coughed up the suggestion, “Did you mean, Gorilla in Tempe?” Nope. “Alexa, play Gorilla in Tempe.” “The weather in Venice is ……”
The music lifts the lid on 18th century opera composers’ traditional cheapskate habit of diving into their grab bag of already popular goodies – so “Spring” from The Four Seasons leaps out as an early chorus, but with some interesting tweaks to cadences that make it even more alluring.
Dorilla is an eroica-pastorale – and features a princess, Dorilla, the mandatory amorous shepherd, Elmiro and his rival in love Nomio – who turns out to be the God Apollo in human mufti. Spoiler alert. It ends well.
The opera is in Baroque style, so features much set piece pastoral dancing. Think Fragonard drawing room walls. In Act 2 there is a hunt. That’ll be a hoot. The Director is Fabio Ceresa, winner of the 2016 International Opera Award for Young Director. Well-known in Italy, his productions reveal a keen eye for ethereal beauty, in both traditional and contemporary settings.
Next up – bake your cake, then watch it! In a Wexfordly mischievous double bill Rossini’s Adina, subtitled Il califfo di Bagdad, features – a harem? Oh, come on, far too obvious. No, a wedding cake. The wedding cake is baked in the preceding La Cucina, a premier from Irish composer Andrew Synott, libretto by Wexford’s Artistic Director designate, Rosetta Cucchi, who also directs Adina. Still with me? Wake up at the back.
Seems like no-one is directing La Cucina, billed as a divertissement in one act. Ms. Cucchi directed Alfano’s Risurezionne at Wexford 2017. For anyone who remembers my ramblings, that’s the one that brought tears to my eyes.
Adina’s librettist has a knock-out name, Marchese Gherardo Bevilacqa-Aldobrandini (surely worthy of an aira all to himself). It premiered in Lisbon in 1826 and is a ragbag of known Rossini tunes. He wrote the opera for a Portuguese singer he had never met. It was such a hit that it was next performed in … 1963. This is another co-production, this time with the Rossini Opera Festival.
Adina has been described disparagingly in Gramophone as a “small scale pen and ink affair, one-acter”, the last Rossini farse, with music that is “intermittently interesting”. Ouch!
There is no overture. On being asked what groundbreaking artistic motive had driven him to abandon the conventional curtain up, Rossini coolly remarked that the contract had not required him to write one. No pay, no overture. There’s artistic integrity for you.
So, the La Cucina – Adina double bill is, perhaps, a joke – that will either be sparklingly successful, or, like many a wedding cake, end in tiers. Mr. Synott’s last Wexford efforts, Counterparts and The Boarding House, drawn from James Joyce’s The Dubliners were well received. And with Ms. Cucchi directing I predict the evening will be a triumphant riot.
Wexford has a knack of wringing delicious juice from the wrinkliest of operatic lemons – vide Puccini’s Edgar in 1980. Maybe their choice of the little admired Adina will prove inspirational.
Off-piste in the afternoons this year Wexford offers even more unusual delights. The Veiled Prophet by Charles Villiers Stanford, better know for his sacred music for the Anglican liturgy than opera, is based on Thomas Moore’s popular romance, Lalla Rookh. At least, I’m told it’s popular. The copy I keep by my bedside seems to have gone astray. It is set in the middle-east and stuffed with Caliphs, warriors and a veiled prophet whose countenance is so wondrous that to reveal it would destroy those who looked upon it.
Georges Bizet’s Le Docteur Miracle is a comic opérette, which features an amusing “omelette quartet” – no kidding – and the mock-heroic invocation “Voici l’omelette”. Turns out that the omelette was not just poorly cooked, it was poisoned and when there’s a poisoned omelette in the libretto, who do you call? Omelette-Busters!!! – a.k.a. Docteur Miracle. Hmmmm.
Cendrillon is a version by Pauline Viardot, a leading late 19th century French mezzo-soprano – and, unusually, pedagogue – who gives the familiar Cinderella story “its own light, distinctive touch”. As it’s based on Mlle. Viardot’s extensive experience of Parisian late 19th century life, watch out for a few indiscretions with the slipper.
And then, L’Inganno Felice, by Rossini. This “fortunate deception” is another farsa, set in a seaside mining community and with plenty of “buffo bustle” to set off the “rather sad” music.
So, far, so nuts. But that’s Wexford, the unlikely Festival, which never ceases to amaze and thrill – and where a community welcomes its annual invasion of opera buffoons with open arms. The real Docteur Miracle is Dr. Tom Walsh, the Wexford GP who founded the whole shebang in 1951.